Appassionato

Damned businessmen

Categorised as Internet, Rants & tagged with Internet, shopping.

Dammit. I busted my monthly Internet bandwidth. Again.

Some of you in the nice Northern Hemi­sphere may be thinking “WTF Internet bandwidth” but yeah, that’s right. Telecom Xtra is the monopoly over our broadband Internet here and we get crap service at high prices. The plan we’re with gives 6 GB Internet bandwidth at the damned rate of $49.95 NZD ($36.00 USD) a month, not to mention we have one of the slowest broadband speeds in the OECD already.

Neither my sister nor I know what we did to suddenly bust the 6 GB bandwidth just four days before the recurring date but right now I’m having to suffer 56K dial-up speed. I can’t even load my site properly in Mozilla Firefox. Actually, let me rephrase that: I can’t load any page properly in Firefox so I’m back to Opera again. It’s killing me.

I had always been com­plain­ing about the crap broadband speed we got – about 150~200 KB/s down­load­ing from most sites – but now I under­stand what real pain-in-the-arse means. Last night, I was down­load­ing a file at 4 KB/s. The second file I down­loaded was pro­gress­ing at 0.5 KB/s. All this is due to the bloody rich firm that provides the bad service. They have no com­pet­i­tion to face in the industry so it doesn’t matter what price they set or what service they give, we all have to pay them. Die.

And to add to all the slow Internet killing my mood, I acci­dent­ally bidded on a 1 GB MP4 player on TradeMe when I thought it was a 2 GB. It wasn’t purely my fault since that auction came up in the search results when I entered “2GB MP4 player”. Anyhow, I won that at $57 NZD and realised I made a mistake fighting over it with another bidder. I then went after the 2 GB one I really wanted and won it at $59 NZD. Yeah. $2 for 1 GB upgrade. I should laugh? Heee. But, no.

It was the same seller that listed the items and I mailed him straight after­wards asking if we could please cancel the trade and I would be willing to pay any costs he had incurred in listing the auction, which would amount to something no more than $3.95. And he replied me:

Please pay $10 (admin and restock­ing charge) to our bank account

“Admin and restock­ing charge” my ass. It was just a Chinese guy bringing cheap MP4 players in from China and reselling here for triple or quadruple the price and he’s charging a sixth of the item’s price for some admin and “restock­ing” crap. The item hasn’t even been dis­patched! I shall now give the 1 GB MP4 player to my friend who doesn’t have one since if I do resell the item, I don’t think I’d find another stupid girl who’d bid up to $57 for it thinking it was a 2 GB.

So now, I am broke again. But at least I’ll now treasure my 200 KB/s download speed to come in two days. (Perhaps only for a week in, though.)